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==> Ted Neward is in favour of Embracing “Old” Tech, and I agree.
In one of his books, Nassim Nicholas Taleb mentions the “Lindy effect”, and I’ve frequently used it as a mental model ever since coming across it: For a book that has continuously been read for the last 100 years, you can expect it will continue to be read for the next 100 years. For a book that has only come out last year and has been continuously read since then, you should have an expectation that one year from now, people will no longer be reading it.
So, when picking a tech stack for a software investment and you want a reasonable expectation that it will still be actively maintained 10 years from now, you need to go back in time by 10 years. I’ve found this 10 years time horizon a useful one to work with, based on version histories of various bits of software I build upon. For example, for Python, this takes me back to version 3.4, before type decorators and many other things hit the scene that I disapprove of. So now, I test all my code with both version 3.4 and the newest version (3.11). I won’t use language features from 3.11 that weren’t already there in 3.4, and I won’t use code in 3.4 that breaks or throws deprecation warnings in 3.11. I also apply this test to dependencies, paying close attention to what happens if I try to get the newest version of some Python library running on version 3.4 of the interpreter or a 10-year-old version of the library on version 3.11 of the interpreter.
This means my code is engineered so that it could have been in continuous operation for the last 10 years while running continuous updates on what’s underneath it. And this gives me a reasonable expectation that my code will require only minimal code changes over the next 10 years to keep up with whatever might arise.
With the python interpreter itself, it’s remarkably easy to do that. I feel it doesn’t limit my coding in any meaningful way. With other bits of software, including many python libraries that one might depend on, it would be absolutely unworkable. In such a case, I take that as a clear signal not to use the software dependency at all. This is a lot of work, but also a good forcing function that prevents me from becoming a dependency hog myself.
#wirtschaft #computer | Mär-02 2023
#politik #computer #wirtschaft 2023q4 2023q3 2023q2 2023q1 2022q4 2022q3 2022q1 2021q1 2020q3 2020q1 2019q4 2019q3 2019q2 2019q1 2018q3 2018q2